That I would publish this picture is proof that I love other moms more than my pride.

That I would publish this picture is proof that I love other moms more than my pride.

Let me preface this by admitting that I might be in a sweet spot—the baby years behind me and still a safe distance from teenagers. Maybe I’ll look back at this in 6 years (essentially, tomorrow) and laugh at my naïve self.

There’s a story my mom tells about feeling really proud of herself after she’d potty-trained all four of her kids and saying something to her mother-in-law about how she had essentially done her job. My grandmother—mother of 7!—just laughed.

So, maybe it never ends, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be relieved to get past potty-training.

There’s something I want to say to new moms—moms lost in the fog of infancy, in the middle of the sleepless and thankless era, struggling through those first overwhelming months of motherhood. There’s something I need you to know… It gets better.

Have you heard of the It Gets Better Project? In September 2010, the writer Dan Savage and his partner created a video for YouTube in an effort to reach out to LGBT youth after a string of suicides hit the front pages. It’s pure, concentrated Storytelling Saves Lives. Simply saying, “It gets better.” It’s such a big little thing to do.

Well, I’m no Dan Savage. Or President Obama or Ellen or Ke$ha or Sarah Silverman. Or any one of the other heavyweights that have recorded messages for that campaign, but I think we need something like this for moms. Struggling new moms need to hear that it does, really and truly, get better.

And it’s up to moms who have been there to let them know. Maybe we could recruit Jennifer Garner? Beyonce, for sure! And Angelina, of course. Not sure if Gwyneth is quite right for this.

I remember when I was a young new mom, turning to other moms with older kids in a desperate haze with that question, “Does it get better?”

Most of the time, they didn’t say what I wanted them to say (what I needed them to say). But even as I was told, “No,” by mom after mom, I could tell they were lying.

I was a puddle-y mess of greasy hair and spit-up and tears, and there they were: Standing around as if the world just keeps turning around and around and they are going to live through it.

Seems to me the worst thing you could say to a new mom is, “I never gets any easier.”

My kids are 4 and 7 now, so now I can say from experience what I needed to hear when I was new at this. It. Gets. Better. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. Or probably not lying so much as suffering from amnesia.

I’m not saying that it’s smooth sailing as soon as you exit the baby phase. But that’s not what new moms are asking, and it’s cruel to pretend it is. It’s cruel to pretend that being a parent stays as hard as it is in the beginning.

Like a brand new spring chicken being born, becoming a mom is like cracking through the hard shell of what your world has always been, and suddenly, you are new at everything and everything is upside down. Parenting has the steepest learning curve of anything I’ve ever done. Day one: you know nothing. Day two: no one knows your baby better than you.

When my first baby was born, our pediatrician came to check out our daughter. She was crying when he walked into the room. He walked up confidently, took her from our novice arms and did this magical thing with his finger on the roof of her mouth. Instantly, of course, she stopped crying. We were like, “What just happened? You know everything! We need you to come home with us now!”

He said something like, “I know more about your baby right now because I’ve been doing this for a long time. But if I were to see you 24-hours from now, you would be the expert.” Basically, you are learning something new about your child, yourself as a parent and how to parent your child (three totally different things!) all the time.

It gets better because you get better. Problems may become more complicated, but you become so much smarter all the time. With every passing moment, you are building a foundation—a solid relationship with your child, a strong sense of who you are as a parent, and the confidence that comes only with time.

It’s so intense in the beginning. So all-consuming. So bewildering.

Just think about this one thing—when was the last time you drove in a car with a child screaming and crying for no apparent reason other than they don’t like being in cars? I remember the moment in which I realized that I was no longer bracing myself, every time I drove somewhere, for the possibility of a total meltdown that I couldn’t control and just had to live (and drive!) through.

Or this. When is the last time you went to sleep at night absolutely certain that it would not be morning yet when you were awake again? The fact that you get to sleep through the night after babyhood is reason enough to prove it gets better. Anything is better when you’ve had a full night’s sleep. And not the occasional surprise, but on the regular. Of course, older kids get stomach viruses and need to come home from sleepovers and have nightmares. But most nights, you get to sleep.

And this. Babies can’t talk about it. There is nothing you can say to make it better. They can’t explain themselves. You will never ever know why they wouldn’t stop crying for five hours straight in the middle of that one night you will never forget.

You get to sleep, you can drive un-traumatized, and they understand the words coming out of your mouth. Easier.

And yet moms of teenagers are still trying to tell me the same thing—actually, now, they’ve raised the bar to, “It gets harder.” The stakes are higher, they say. If you mess up with a baby, the consequences are short-lived and not serious. When you mess up with a teenager, there can be life-long impact.

I won’t deny any of it—if only because it’s terrifying and I don’t want to set off some kind of karmic wave that will crash down on me as the clock ticks past 12. But it’s just not the same.

There is nothing like the early days of parenthood. It’s so intense and anxiety-filled. Like chalk and cheese.

I remember, when I was pregnant, talking to a mom with sleepless babies. I was complaining about being tired, and then suddenly felt like a total jerk! Who was I to complain? At least I could sleep! She must have been more exhausted than me! But instead, she said something surprising, “There’s nothing like the exhaustion of pregnancy.”

Not even babies who wake up multiple times a night. The exhaustion of pregnancy is so complete. New baby tired is real (I remember my arms being so weak from exhaustion that I was afraid I’d drop my baby!). But pregnant tired is a full body experience that you can’t escape, no matter how much you sleep. You cannot leave your body and your body is climbing a mountain even while you are sitting still. You are tired deep down to the bone.

I was grateful to that mom for saying that. And it even made me feel less dread for the coming sleepless nights. I had been thinking that I was going to be going from one kind of total exhaustion to another—and in some ways, that’s true. But it’s not the same.

The hardest part of new parenthood is that same feeling of being unable to escape. But it’s emotional, not physical. And when that adjustment settles, when you realize that this parenting thing is going to be hard for the rest of your life, the burden suddenly somehow becomes lighter. You no longer feel—every moment of every day—like you can’t escape from it. It settles down into who you are and then you’re just doing it. A person cannot function at peak stress level forever. At some point, it normalizes.

I think pregnancy exhaustion prepares you, body and mind, for new baby exhaustion. And I think new motherhood prepares you for what’s to come in the same way—eventually you adjust to the new normal and it’s not impossible anymore. Not easy, but nothing like those early days. I think new moms need to know that, and we need to stop telling them that it’s always just as hard forever.

Remember back to those early days. For the sake of other moms, remember that it gets better. And say so.

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“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November* in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

It’s raining and cold and it’s a minor miracle that I’m not in bed under heavy blankets, watching TV and eating canned cherry pie filling.

It must be February.

When I was in college, my best friend and I had an agreement that you were allowed to do whatever you needed to do to get through February. The big one I remember was: eat ice cream every day. And she was a former ballet dancer, so that’s a pretty good indicator of how awful February is.

Wanna play Tetris instead of writing your paper? Yes, yes, I do. Can’t be bothered to walk across campus for that morning class? Yeah, it’s cold out. I get it. What are you doing with that guy? It’s February! No judgement!

My parenting equivalent of Ice Cream February is “Say Yes to Everything.”

Let’s just go to Target and wader the aisles together, okay? I’m sure there’s a toy in it for you. Or at least some chocolate milk. You don’t want the chocolate milk you just opened? Fine, we’ll get the vanilla, too.

Have you seen that Onion headline (http://www.theonion.com/article/kids-love-when-mom-sad-enough-just-order-pizza-50515), “Kids Love When Mom Is Sad Enough to Just Order Pizza”? I’m right there. I can't be bothered to fight with my kids over anything. I’m worn down. Resistance is futile.

“Can I have another Girl Scout Cookie?” Sure, why not. (Those Girl Scouts aren’t fooling around with their February sales strategy!)

“I don’t want to take a bath tonight.” Well, that works out fine, because I don’t want to give you a bath tonight.

“Can I just wear this to bed?” Sure, good night.

“I don’t want to go to school.” How about watching Gilmore Girls reruns in bed with Mama?

Winter is so isolating. And it’s not just seasonal affective disorder, so don’t try to sell me a mood lamp. It’s more like a conspiracy of everything at once telling you that there’s just no good reason for ambition right now.

Or maybe more charitably, there’s some core biological wiring that makes us feel drawn toward the human version of hibernation. Instead of going to the park, let’s just get out of the cold, stay at home and hunker down.

February isn’t a very charitable month, so it can be hard to just be ok with a slowed down world. And it really is more than that, too. It’s not just a cozy-by-the-fireplace kind of phenomenon. It doesn’t feel good.

But if we’re all out there hunkering down alone, it’s almost like we’re doing it together. You think of me, I’ll think of you, and see you in April? I feel like I can almost see other moms, out there, taking another deep breath, holding it inside and then sighing it out. This day will eventually end. All prior evidence points to the fact that days all finally come to an end. And all Februarys end, even ones with the pesky extra leap year day.

It’s usually about this time of year that I start feeling like I’m behind on everything. The kids always seem to get sick and suck up two weeks of time just like that. And then there’s whatever pathetic amount of snow we get in DC and the corresponding unexpected days off from school. And then I get sick. And we cancel plans because someone else’s kid is always sick, too.

So, everything just piles up, like I imagine actual snow does in other places in winter. And before I know it, flowers are popping up everywhere mocking me for having accomplished nothing since November.

I’m not exactly excelling at motherhood. I don’t do enough with the kids. I don’t engage enough. I’m not patient enough. You’d think with all of the not-accomplishing-anything, I could at least feel like I’m indulging in special time with the kids. It certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Combine extra kids-at-home days with my general lack of motivation and I’m not working enough. I’m not getting enough done. A whole month passed and I can’t point to anything.

Even the regular stuff. I can’t stay on top of the regular stuff.

The laundry. I can’t even think about the laundry. There’s not one corner of the house that feels relaxing, each vantage with its own to-do list taunting me. I don’t do enough around the house. I’m there all the time and still, all the dishes.

I just feel like the days are lost. One after another, they just fall off the calendar while I stare at the naked trees through the window.

There’s some peculiar characteristic of motherhood that can make a woman feel like she is simultaneously not enough at every single thing she does. I would think that failing in one area would mean that another area is thriving, but it’s not like that. When my energy is low and I’m feeling very self-judge-y, nothing is spared.

And kind of like the beginning of Moby Dick (see below) with wanting to knock the hats off of everyone’s heads, I know when things get like this, there’s just one thing I need to do. And it’s not get to sea.

It’s time to see a friend who understands, get away from the house and the kids and the need to prove anything and go have a coffee or a cocktail with a real live friend. And there’s actually something we need to toast—we’re almost there! Just one more week…

* All due respect to Melville, but clearly, he means February.

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In the Age of Induction

Seven days late

At 41 weeks pregnant, my auto-generated, pregnancy week-by-week email seemed certain this could only mean that I had neglected to click the link declaring my son’s arrival. Had I stayed with the OB practice I started my pregnancy with, there’s a decent chance my baby would have been two days old, having arrived by way of induction sometime conveniently before 5:00 pm last Friday.

But I was a midwife patient. Waiting it out old-school style. With no end in sight.

There’s something embarrassing about going past your due date. Something beyond the unwieldy way you move and the way all clothing looks ridiculous by the end.

My body was supposed to be doing something and it wasn’t and everyone was watching and there was nothing I could do about it. I was humiliated. I wanted to hide.

Eight Days Late

It was 6:00 am and I had been up since 4:40 when I noted the time of the one lonely contraction I had last night. After waiting an hour for anything else to happen, I cried to my husband, “I can’t be pregnant anymore.” He told me we’d talk in the morning and rolled over to sleep. I got up to eat breakfast and tried not to Google “natural labor induction.” Again...

The first time I ever tried to talk politics with my daughter, she was about three and a half. Somehow things went very quickly from talking about the presidential “vote” at her preschool (complete with ballot initiatives—ah, preschool in DC!) to a history of women’s suffrage. I could tell I lost her about halfway into it, but couldn’t figure out how to stop talking. My favorite part was when she asked if her (white, male, land-owning) dad was allowed to vote.

I believe in talking to my kids about politics the way some might about God or the birds and the bees—early and often. But I have no control whatsoever over what they actually hear as the words are coming out of my mouth. It’s always interesting to see what’s retained, what’s lost.

Kind of like with the whole God thing, my husband and I don’t always agree. Which I think is great for them to see. My husband wants them to learn phrases like “evil capitalist” and “workers of the world unite.” I try my best to balance the desire to indoctrinate my kids into my value system with a desire for them to know that reasonable people can disagree.

Yesterday, I was driving four kids in a carpool home from school through the no-chain store main street of our postage-stamp-size downtown in uber-liberal land. Conversations during carpool are never exactly high-minded—usually the words “fart” and “butt” dominate between outbursts of loud laughter. This particular afternoon, they were discussing ways to dispose of Donald Trump.

“Attack him with cement!” seemed to carry the day as the favorite choice. If I was a mafia mama, I might have been proud.

One of the girls was apparently horrified when her parents told her that Donald Trump told another grown-up to shut-up. They all agreed, that was pretty terrible. “Oh, honey, he’s said a lot worse things than that…”

Another little kid I know thinks Trump stole the birdbath from his front yard. All politics is local, right?

Later that evening, my daughter was overflowing with questions about Trump—

Why did his parents let him be so mean? (Well, they probably weren’t very nice people either.)

Why isn’t he in jail if he’s a bad person? (He’s not a criminal, he just has a lot of bad ideas.)

What kind of bad ideas? (People from a whole entire religion shouldn’t be allowed in our country. We should build a wall to keep Mexicans from coming into our country…)

That is bad!

During the last presidential election cycle, when she wasn’t yet four, I tried to teach her about the issues that made me not want to vote for Mitt Romney. I told her things like, “He doesn’t trust women to make their own decisions about whether or not they want to have babies,” and “He doesn’t think that all people deserve to be able to go to a doctor when they’re sick.” All she remembered—and repeated—was, “Mitt Romney doesn’t like women.” I tried to correct her, but nuance isn’t big with the preschool set.

How was she to understand the difference between “like” and “trust” when she was still learning that her parents love her even when they’re upset with her?

This time around, it is a very big deal to me to be able to talk to her about a woman running for president. Huge, to use the parlance of this election cycle. I want a female president for her even more than I want one for myself or for the country.

Much as it made about as much sense to her that her dad wouldn’t be able to vote as that her mom would once not have been able to vote… Much as she thinks it’s just the same that two women could get married as that marriage is somehow meant for different genders only… Much as it will never seem anything but ordinary to her to see a black president… She doesn’t seem to really understand why it’s so significant that Hillary Clinton is as close to winning the presidency as any woman has ever been.

Hope for the future yet, on the one hand. On the other, she needs to know her history. There is too much ugly to risk repeating by letting her believe that things have always been this way.

These days, we tell our girls that they can do anything. I heard it all my life—at least up until my brothers were able to go places I wasn’t allowed alone because it was safer for them than for my teenage girl body. But our daughters, even more than us, have seen women who are astronauts and business owners and pretty much anything else they could ever want to be. Except president.

My parents’ generation grew up believing that not being a racist meant being colorblind. We know now that even babies as young as six-months old notice differences in skin color. And we know that they form ideas about race from what surrounds them, that not talking about race doesn’t lead to equality. We celebrate diversity. We understand the importance of diversity. We tell them different is beautiful.

We wouldn’t think to try to raise our kids in a colorblind world. But when it comes to gender, I feel like we are trying to raise our kids in a gender-blind world. “We’re all the same!” Kids aren’t stupid—and for whatever reason, they begin to divide roughly along gender lines between about three and four. As liberals, we feel panicked when this happens, like we’re failing some feminist parenting test. We’re not.

Girls and boys are different. Of course, any one boy could be as different from “boys” as most “girls” are, and vice versa. We try to make room for that. But while we tell our girls that they can do anything boys can do, we often fail to tell our boys that they can do anything girls can do. We tell girls they can be anything, and then we encourage them to do boy things. Trucks, dinosaurs, astronauts! And so things that girly girls do—wear pink, like princesses, play with dolls, whatever—become less-than. We want all of our children to play the games that little boys play.

Well, I want more for my daughter. And my son. Until we accept that there are gender differences, and stop trying to make everyone fit into the male mold, we won’t know equality. Until boys can do what girls can do, girls who play the boy games are only equal in so far as they play the boy games.

A woman running for president today has to do it like a man. And then get ripped apart for doing it like a man. And then be told that their voice is no different than a man’s voice, so they are not needed. Don’t worry—the boys got this one. Again.

If we can accept that it means something to African-Americans to see a black president—as we should, why is it unacceptable that seeing a female president would mean something to women and to girls? This seems to me the ultimate acceptance that gender-neutral is male. If we want to be equal, we’d better start accepting that a man’s point-of-view is the same as a woman’s? That’s not the kind of equality I believe in.

I believe in a voices-at-the-table kind of equality. I believe that women live different lives than men. I believe we see things and experience things that they just don’t. We can accept that any single person may not fit into the expectations of their chosen or un-chosen gender, but that doesn’t mean we have achieved gender-equality. No matter how good a feminist a man might be, it’s not the same as being a woman. Of course, women can be bad feminists—there’s certainly equality in that. Many of the women who rise to the top of their chosen field have disappointed women—I’m looking at you, Marissa Mayer.

I do not expect perfection in a presidential candidate, or a president. Not from a man or from a woman. A certain sort of person is attracted to such a path in life. They make decisions about things I can’t fathom being responsible for. We should ask a lot of questions of anyone wanting that job.

But I do expect to see a woman president in my lifetime—and to vote for her.

Hillary Clinton is not Margaret Thatcher. She’s not Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin. She may not be Elizabeth Warren, but I’d like to see what would happen if Warren tried to walk the path that Clinton is walking. Maybe the third woman president will be a frumpy, Jewish, democratic socialist Brooklynite. But I doubt it.

Backwards and in high heels, I’m voting for Ginger Rogers. And I’m going to tell my daughter—and my son—all about it. We'll see what they take from it.

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My first kid was sleeping through the night at two months old. Other new moms weren’t exactly thrilled for me. I tried to be humble, but I confess I was pretty sure I was doing an awesome job.

Until she stopped sleeping through the night five months later. Then I felt like I was doing a shitty job. When she got back on track after a month or two, so did my good-mom-identity. I was good at teaching a baby how to sleep. I was good at being a mom.

Then I had a second child. At eight months, he was still waking up six times a night. Because it turns out that I am not in fact a sleep expert or a perfect parent. I just got lucky the first time around.

My first was so easy (being a mom was hard, but she was easy). I could take her anywhere. She napped in the car. She crawled early. She walked when we expected. She talked up a storm, with actual little sentences by her first birthday.

So, I confess: I was pretty proud. She was a great kid, so obviously I was an all-star mom.

When other parents—whose babies weren’t doing what they were supposedly supposed to do (sleep or walk or talk or whatever it was) when they were supposedly supposed to be doing it—would ask me how I did it, I actually answered them. It’s cringeworthy looking back at it now. “Well, I talk to her all the time” or “We do a lot of tummy time” or “You just have to put them down in the crib really slowly.” I actually thought I had answers.

Second kids are really, really good at one thing: humbling their parents.

Apparently, I wasn’t a sleep guru, didn’t have anything to do with my daughter crawling and was not at all responsible for her early talking. My son did everything on his own timetable, because kids are not blank slates we get to draw and they are not even tiny copies of ourselves. They are each their own little individual selves, with brains and bodies that have their own ideas. It has nothing to do with us.

My second kid was really great in helping me figure this out. With my first, I had a lot of “I’ll never…” One of which was: I’ll never give my kid a pacifier. Well, baby number two got one on day two. He needed it. That I never gave one to my first may have been more a product of her temperament than my principles.

The other side of this lesson is that the second kid also teaches you that the first one isn’t perfect either. When my son came along, I looked at him and realized he was good at and easy about different things. Which had a way of shining a light on the more challenging things about my daughter. She, like me, can talk incessantly. My son is quieter. Which is nice. He also hardly ever falls—he seems to have a more intuitive sense of where his body is in the world. My daughter sort of floats around and—no exaggeration—can fall down when she’s just standing still or off a chair she’s sitting in.

With two kids, I think we learn that we don’t know what we’d do if we had a different kids. We don’t know what we’d do if we had someone else’s kid. It’s a lot harder to judge someone else’s parenting when you realize how much it’s a combustible mixture of who your kid is and who you are and how you were raised and a million other things.

I don’t know how I would parent anyone else’s kids but my own. Even that’s an ever-evolving experiment.

Knowing how much I’ve learned from having a second kid, I can only imagine how much parents of three or four kids learn. Though I think I’ll stick to asking them for their wisdom over first-hand, hands-on learning on that one!

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Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond?

As long as I can remember, I’ve had this question in the back of my head, as if every decision—where to live, where to work, when to have kids—could somehow be made with this in mind.

Maybe it’s because of the American way we grow up thinking we could be President, if only we wanted to. So, if you don’t want to be President, it must be because you have some other fabulous plan. In part, it’s generational. Our parents were more likely to think about jobs as stable things that provide pensions, not identities.

But those of us coming up on midlife these days expected something different—a job that would say something about who we are as a person. We focused on meaning, not benefits (which is really another way of saying the parts of the job that allow for a life outside of work, like getting sick or taking a vacation or having a family).

It’s as much idealism as it is egoism—we want to do something that matters because we want to matter.

I don’t remember ever thinking I could “have it all.” For as long as I can remember, it seemed like a choice—being a mother or being something else. What is your legacy? How will you leave your mark on this world? Will you leave behind children or will you leave behind some kind of accomplishment?

I was either walking in the direction of something—being a writer, traveling the world, having an impressive job—or walking way from that, retreating to some idea of family life. Publish a book or have a kid. Both do something to extend your presence in the world, the impact of your existence. Something that will be here when you’re gone.

This bilateral thinking solidified when I got pregnant in the middle of college. I would either have kids or graduate college. If I wanted to be a writer, the right choice was an abortion. Once I had kids, it would all be done, choice made, only the living of the life remaining.

So I went about my way, trying to be a writer. Not being a mother. And then, somewhere along the way, between working long hours and going out for drinks, I got older and I had kids.

I think a lot of women have a bit of a post-kid identity crisis. (I don’t know if it’s the same for men.) Who are we now that we’re mothers? What happened to our old self? How can we hold onto that old self? Or how can we break that identity apart to make enough room for this mom thing to fit in, too? It takes a long time to let go of who you were before you had kids and it’s not an easy, fluid thing. It’s lumpy, bumpy, fits and starts and maybe never ends.

Lately—something about turning 40, I think—I’ve been in some kind of mid-life crisis thinking mode, which can best be described like this: Big fish? Small fish? Too bad: you’re not a fish! You’re a drop of water in the ocean. A drop of water in a vast ocean on a tiny planet. Stardust in infinite space.

It’s not easy to feel that small and temporary. If you sit with the idea of your death for long enough, it’s hard to get going again. But holding that fact in one hand and the life you’re living in the other, the acknowledgement that we are going to be gone one day can actually make you feel more alive.

How you live your days is how you live your life, right?

Somewhere I can’t remember, I picked up this little bit of writing attributed to Kurt Vonnegut—“Notice when you're happy.” And another little bit of unattributed wisdom that has also been caught in my fish net brain—Find a happy place and continue walking in that direction.

I just keep thinking, “It's so small. I am so small.” My writing, my days, my kids, my family. I spent so much time thinking about being a big fish or a small fish, trying to be some kind of fish, but mostly just flopping around in some pond not being able to feel how big or little it was, how big or little I was.

Maybe it’s what happens after forty years of flopping around, but lately I’ve been wondering something…What if I am happy? Fish or drop of water or stardust… What if it is enough? Not big or little, just enough. My kids, my family, my writing, my community. It’s a life. It’s not always happy or easy, but it’s mine. It’s right where I belong.

When I was younger, I think I thought I would get to a place like this and feel like life was over. Turns out, it’s actually a pretty amazing place to be—only the living of the life remaining. Not drudgery—although there is plenty of that. It’s not like the laundry is going anywhere. It’s more like belonging, or settling in, or arriving somewhere I didn’t even know I was going.

If this is it, I’m good with that. This is my life and I am living it. I’m sure there are plenty of days ahead of feeling like I’m not enough. The feeling that you do enough, have enough, are enough is a slippery little tricky thing. Hard to hold onto.

But still somehow, it’s like an existential crisis has ended. Or at least come to a resting place. And my kids are four and seven, so I could really use some rest about now.

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My daughter has been wearing a bandage around her uninjured left foot for over a week.

When I picked her up from school last week, she was hopping around on one foot. Despite the elaborate tale she told and the fact that she kept hopping on one foot all evening until bedtime, and again straight out of bed the next morning, she was actually fine.

Once or twice that first evening, I caught her with her guard down, standing on both feet. Using my least judgmental mommy voice, I would say, “Look, you’re standing on both feet!” And she would immediately recoil her foot start crying—really crying—that it really did hurt and that standing on it just then made it hurt even more.

I decided to take her claim seriously anyway. I’m not in her body. I want to teach her to take care of and listen to her body, and the whole ruse seemed too elaborate for a seven year old to be a definite, easy-to-spot lie. Maybe she didn’t need to be hopping around, but maybe there was a real injury that would get worse if I told her to toughen up and shake it off.

In addition to promising to take her to the doctor the next morning, I wrote a note to her teacher asking why she wasn’t sent to the nurse after hopping around all day—only to find out that she hadn’t been hopping around all day. Her teacher said it was only a little at the end of the day and her instinct was that it was something that required sympathy more than urgent attention. Trying to get the truth out of her, I read the reply to my daughter on the way to the doctor. She did adjust her story, but she stuck to it.

I tried repeatedly to give her a way out of her lie. I suggested that maybe her foot was feeling better, which would be great and she could just let me know. She declined. In a hail mary attempt, I told her that she really needed to tell the truth to the doctor, no matter what it was.

When we got there, I spoke to the doctor alone before she saw my daughter so I could explain that it’s possible that nothing was really wrong. I felt embarrassed that I needed the help of a doctor to fix an imaginary injury. But what else to do?

Maybe it’s my fault. I can admit it. I give my kids unnecessary Band-Aids. But the thing is—placebos work! If a real Band-Aid will help stop real tears, does it matter that it’s not serving its official purpose to stop bleeding?

I think it’s just part of what moms do—kiss and make it better.

After an exam turned up no obvious reason to worry, the doctor told her that her foot wasn’t broken or fractured. Maybe it was a little bruised, she suggested. At least that offered the validation of naming it.

In an effort to get her to stop hopping around on one foot (and possibly sustaining an actual injury), the doctor taped up her foot in a bright purple bandage and told her that she would now be able to walk on it. Of course, leaving out the fact that she could have walked on it a minute before, too, without the bandage.

After a little nudging, the hopping stopped. She said the bandage made it better, and she could now walk on two feet. And she did. By the time I got her to school that day, the teacher had to tell her to walk, not skip, in the hallway.

If a real bandage can heal fake pain, is that so terrible?

In her second grade class, they are studying issues around disability and accessibility, and it turns out that she’s not the only one hoping around. Three other girls also claimed ankle injuries and hopped around on one foot, but those resolved on their own in a few hours. There’s also an older girl at school who has been hobbling around with a cast on her leg and crutches tricked out with stuffed tigers that must seem the height of cool to a seven year old. Maybe she’s just trying on what it would be like to have a disability or a serious injury.

“Time to read her The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” my mom remarked.

Why was she lying? Did she even know she was lying? Was this a simple cry for attention? If I didn’t make her see—and say—that she was lying, was she on some dangerous road to becoming a compulsive liar? Confused about what to do, I talked to a friend who is an early childhood educator. She laughed. And praised my daughter’s rich imagination. She’s just telling stories, she said. It’s apparently totally normal for her age. For me, knowing that a behavior is age-appropriate really helps keep the frustration at bay.

I confess I sometimes make moments like this more than they are. I’m afraid I’ll miss a potential “teachable moment” by saying nothing or saying the wrong thing. And the chance might never come along again! One parenting mistake at a critical moment will ruin her forever! This is the thing she’ll blame me for when she’s in therapy in 20 years!

When I can see how absurd that is and let go of this idea that there is one perfect thing to say, one big moment I can screw up, one sentence in one talk that will make some permanent difference, I tell myself that it’s not a test. Not everything is a test. If I can't fail at it, then I can't ace it either. So my inner straight-A-student just needs to take a deep breath.

Another parent may have chosen to call her bluff in some way. Or be angry that she lied. Or just have ignored the whole thing. I’ve decided to think of the purple bandage like a tutu. I would let her wear a tutu almost anywhere (with weather appropriate accessories, of course), so I can do the same with this play prop too.

I probably didn’t do the right thing or the wrong thing. And either way, she won’t go off to college with a purple bandage around her foot. And that’s pretty much where I draw the good parenting line. If it’ll clear up on its own before college, I should just relax.

Hopefully she’ll get bored. Until then, I’ll just try to keep giving her kisses to make it better.

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